


Black Flowers Blossom

by NeoVenus22



Category: Sanctuary (webseries)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-26
Updated: 2009-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-05 07:11:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeoVenus22/pseuds/NeoVenus22
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU [written pre-series].  Will is a man torn between two worlds, equally fantastical and breaking him apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Flowers Blossom

"You wanna analyze me?" Ashley asked breathlessly. Will was on his back, stretched out across his own damned couch, and Ashley had crawled astride him. In a few minutes, the layers of clothes separating the two of them were going to be a real burden.

"You're acting out," he croaked, and instantly hated his voice for betraying him. He was supposed to have control. He was the one with age and experience, and it should have come with respectability and responsibility. Ashley was, after all, the daughter of Helen, Dr. Magnus, who was his boss, and on rare occasions, his friend.

"Wouldn't you, if you were me?" She ground herself down against his defenseless hips, and he struggled not to close his eyes, or let out anything that could have been considered an irregular breath. "I have been kidnapped, I have been tortured, I have been held against my will in a number of gruesome locales," she recited. "Of course I'm acting out, Will. Glad to see you really earned that big deal degree of yours."

"So what is this, revenge?"

"Try to think of it as... creative coping. And you don't get to complain."

_Who says I'm complaining?_ Will thought, and he had to give himself credit for even that musing. It was hard to do any thinking at all at the moment.

But before he could come up with a suitable answer, Ashley silenced any final protests with a deep, wet, bruising sort of kiss that left him ragged and stupefied. He'd long since lost control of his body, and leaned upwards into her inviting lips as though he was a starving man and she was dangling a grocery bag over him, filled with both mystery and promise.

"Are you fucking my mother?" she asked abruptly, ending his desire for any physical contact, then or ever.

"What?"

"Answer the question, psych boy. Are you sleeping with Helen."

"No," he said, although there was a lack of conviction to his words of which they both took notice.

"Dammit," she sighed, and sank back on her haunches, landing somewhere around his knees. "Freud would have a field day with this."

"You have no idea," he muttered. His legs were starting to ache.

"So maybe you aren't, yet, and maybe you want to," she surmised. "Let me tell you, the way to get in good with the boss is not to screw the boss's daughter."

"You should probably go," he said, quietly but firmly, and she miraculously didn't argue. She only pressed the heels of her hands into his gut for leverage as she pushed herself off him. He lay there, barely breathing. He watched her, and waited for further instruction just as carefully as he waited for the feeling to come back into his legs.

Ashley smoothed her tight leather pants over her thighs. It was obviously an unconscious gesture, a desire to clean herself up before she went back into the public eye of the Sanctuary, but regardless, Will couldn't take his eyes away from her. She paused with her hand on the doorknob of his office, and flashed him a glance over her shoulder. It was a smooth, effortless move, the delicate sway of the curtain of blond hair managing to convey an innocent seduction as she studied him. "Just tell me this, Will. Which Magnus are you really after?"

The Magnuses have been plaguing him ever since he agreed to work at the Sanctuary, he thought, with only a fleeting measure of sanity. Rambunctious, rebellious Ashley, who acted purely on instinct, who saw life from moment to moment. And Helen, the good doctor, who thought and rethought before she did anything, whose genius was impressive and whose skills were admirable, but who always had a sad sort of aura about her. The psychiatrist in Will knew he shouldn't trust the expression in Helen's or Ashley's eyes when they looked at him. They were both damaged, but for some reason, they both seemed to hold to the belief he could fix them. A part of him wanted to believe it, too.

He took too long with his answer, and darkness flickered in Ashley's luminous eyes —huge and expressive, just like her mother's— before she finally flounced out of the room. It was the age-old dilemma of man, making a mistake without knowing what it was.

Will gathered himself, and trudged out into the hallway. He was on his way to one of the observation rooms when he had a near miss with Bigfoot. "Sorry."

"A bit preoccupied, I take it?" Bigfoot asked good-naturedly.

"Yeah."

"Trouble with the Magnuses?"

Will lifted his head. "How did you know," he muttered with a hopeless laugh.

"Written all over your face, Will. On mine, you might not be able to tell, but you're a bit easier to read." Will blushed, but Big, as Ashley had taken to calling him, only chuckled. "So which is it, senior or junior?"

"Six of one, half dozen of the other."

"As if there aren't enough problems with just two of them," Bigfoot cracked. "I understand your problems aren't exactly trivial, Will, but let me just remind you that there are far worse things than having the affections of two women at the same time."

Their stroll had taken them to the two-way mirror outside of Johnny's room. Johnny was a twelve-year-old kid who kept undergoing painful, debilitating cascade tremors, the unfortunate side effect to entropic cascade failure. It was usually the result of two variations of one person occupying the same reality, but Johnny had never been to any sort of alternate reality, nor did they have any instance of rips between realities occurring within the last fifty years.

This was well beyond anyone's capacity, even Dr. Magnus. Any information they'd garnered about Johnny's condition had been ascertained through email with an astrophysicist who was something of a joke for his slightly outrageous theories. Theories that applied to Johnny's condition, but the lack of practical application thus far had made the theories just words and ideas. In other words, they were flying blind, and poor Johnny was to remain suffering until they figured out how to fix the problem, or the condition worsened and killed him.

Will stood at the window of Johnny's cell, creatively adapted into a 'rec room,' tucking his hands behind his back. It was a reflexive gesture, one that Ashley had pointed out to him, indicating he was about to undergo serious thought. Beyond the glass, Johnny abruptly rose from his work assembling a jigsaw puzzle, retreated to his plain bed, and managed to make it to the center of the mattress with just enough time to draw his knees to his chest and curl his arms around himself before the next tremor hit. They'd progressed to the point where they occurred every half hour or so, giving Johnny only twenty-five minutes at a time to maintain any sort of 'normal' existence. All things considered.

The tremor in question was absurdly violent, perhaps his worst yet. His face stretched beyond the realms of his own physicality, and gleamed with an ethereal sort of light. His body was wracked with shakes, and although he reported that daily, the attacks grew more and more painful, he had since stopped sobbing. Instead, when the cascade tremor ceased, and he was once again whole, he merely sat, drawn and pale, devoid of emotion. Will recognized it as a sort of coping by elimination; Johnny was now at the point where he both recognized his condition and the severity of it, as evidenced by his need to retreat from the delicate puzzle pieces, but believed he could somehow block it out, and ignore the pain.

Johnny got up and calmly returned to fitting together small swatches of cardboard sky. Bigfoot was right; Will's problems certainly did seem miniscule in comparison.

"How's he doing today?" a voice asked softly at Will's right. Big was at his left, so Will was thrown for a minute, until he registered the dulcet tones as Dr. Magnus's.

"He just had another one, right on schedule," Will confessed. He turned to look at Helen, and his heart performed the ultimate cliché of skipping a beat at the sight of her. The thick, dark hair falling full to frame her face. The earnestness trapped in the wide blue eyes. The gentle lines of her face which hinted at maturity. He knew he wasn't the first man, nor would he be the last, to fall for her charms.

"It was pretty bad," he continued, when he had recovered from the shock value of her arrival.

"I wish there was more we could do for him," she said sadly.

"At this point, we're relying solely on whatever information Dr. Gellar sends us," Bigfoot said. "We'll figure out a solution, Dr. Magnus."

She nodded, touching her fingertips to the glass partition. "Will, can we talk?"

Will froze for half a second, thinking erroneously that she'd found out about his near-tryst with her only daughter. Then he realized Ashley was unlikely to discuss the incident with anyone, and even less likely to talk about her subsequent rejection. "Sure," he said, and glanced back at Bigfoot. Big was usually fairly inscrutable, but Will figured he knew more than he let on. Will appreciated that he'd earned Big's respect and trust, moreover, his silence.

He followed Dr. Magnus into her makeshift office, and she waited for him to step past before closing the door behind them. "How are you doing, Will?"

He cracked a wry, mirthless grin. "I thought I was supposed to be the psychiatrist here."

"Did I pile all of this on you at once?" she asked. "I mean, you're rising to the task admirably, but it's still a lot to handle. I wonder if I pushed you too hard and too quickly into this life."

"It was overwhelming at first," he admitted, "but I got used to it. And now I can't imagine doing anything else."

Dr. Magnus's relief was palpable, and her casual grin did things to Will's insides of which he wasn't proud. "I'm glad," she said. "It's been eye-opening, having you around." It was faint praise, not particularly damning, but speaking more to his skills than to him. Unhealthy as it might have been, Will found himself craving Helen Magnus's approval. "And you personally have really re-ignited my passion for what I do."

Will had no idea what to say to that, so he shrugged one shoulder haplessly and said, "Thanks."

It was an inadequate response to a heartfelt admission of admiration —either for him or his skills, he couldn't say to which— and he honestly didn't expect Dr. Magnus to lay her lips to his cheek. He didn't plan for his hand to find its way to the small of her back and keep her body in close proximity to his. He didn't imagine she wouldn't push him away, but would instead give in to the tension and step into his embrace, arms around his neck and tongue firmly entrenched in his mouth. He knew this wasn't the reason she'd called him to the office, but frankly, he was glad for the detour.

All in all, it was turning into a weird day.

Helen Magnus was pliant in his grip, which, had he been in a more analytical frame of mind, might have signaled something to him. Then again, it wasn't as though he wasn't acting on his own feelings of confusion, loneliness, and lust. Emotional stability was more of an ideal than anything else, really. At least in his experience.

But the niggling good conscience wouldn't leave him alone, and seconds after the increasingly passionate embrace sent him reeling and stumbling uncomfortably into the edge of Helen's desk, he extracted himself from her politely. "This..." he began.

"Isn't a good idea," she finished the thought, not that he'd had much of a thought to begin with.

"Yeah," he said. "Um, I'm going to go."

Dr. Magnus nodded slightly, her fingers touching her lips. Will didn't know how to interpret the gesture. She turned her head just enough that her dark hair obscured her face so she wouldn't have to watch Will as he left.

He retreated to the relative safety of his office, trying to ignore the pockmark on his couch that was the wrinkled reminder of his earlier dalliance with Ashley. He knew he couldn't have them both, it was silly even to think it. But if he didn't choose, he'd have neither. And not just in a romantic sense, either, but as in he would likely lose them as friends. That option was much worse, and the Sanctuary program would be all the poorer for their rift.

Will stared at the rows of his books, transplanted from his original office, but gaining dust on the new shelf all the same. Books that were supposed to tell him what was wrong, but not how to fix it. Books that couldn't save Johnny from his inevitable fate. Books that couldn't tell Will whom to choose.

The Sanctuary was the new reality, he'd been told upon recruitment. He was to have his mind expanded, his experience broadened. He was supposed to enlighten, and be enlightened.

He was floundering.


End file.
